1857.] Chronicles of a Clay Farm. 495 



I can give you his soliloquy, for it was written upon his attitude, 

 like the lettering of a picture. 



" Well !— If that don't beat every thing !" 



x\ blessed thing, in its way I say again, is the untamed boldness 

 of youth. There was not a full-grown ''practical farmer " within a 

 ten-mile circuit of the spot where the old drainer stood on that day, 

 wrapt in severe amazement, who would not have thought it as much 

 as his fair fame was worth to give that order. Nothing but the in- 

 conceivable daring of pure, unmitigated Theory would have ventur- 

 ed its character upon such a throw. Now for the explanation. 



Upon all wet, thin, cold, clay soils, the wisdom of antiquity has 

 long established that you are only to plow three or four inches 

 deep ; that you are to ridge up your lands into a certain round- 

 packed shape, from which the rain may run off, as it would from an 

 umbrella, or the roof of a house ; that you are never to cross-plow, 

 or otherwise disturb this consecrated form into which the earth's 

 surface has been once-for-all molded, but to keep scratching it, up 

 and down, shallow enough to insure a seed-time by having a dry 

 surface two inches deep, leaving the furrow, and about a yard on 

 each side of it, as the perpetual channel or bed for water or ice in 

 the winter, and baked sterility in the summer ; that if any body 

 dares to mention to you any thing about that mysterious abomina- 

 tion called the subsoil, you are to screw up your mouth, shake your 

 head, and say, 



" It won't do to bring up that nasty stuff P 



" But don't Gardeners do it sometimes?" I one day ventured to 

 ask, with childlike simplicity, in reply to the established doctrine. 



" That's a different thing : gardeners aren't 'practical farmers.' " 



" But don't the roots of plants grow downward in a field, as well 

 as in a garden ?" 



I don't know how it was, but that provoking question always 

 brought the conversation to an abrupt close. I never could get be- 

 yond it. It stuck in my own throat and every body's else, like 

 Macbeth's Amen. Left alone at last to my own ignorance, I drop- 

 ed deeper and deeper, day after day into a state of confirmed theory, 

 and was given up by all the agricultural faculty. I got strange no- 

 tions into my head, that, as two negatives make an affirmative, per- 

 haps two bad soils might make one good one, and three bad soils, a 

 better still, and four bad ones the best of all! and when I saw the 



